My relationship with my two housemates is becoming fractious. We’ve lived together for two years and I consider them both friends. I pay more rent due to having a higher income (we wouldn’t afford this flat otherwise).
The issue is they don’t clean up after themselves. They will cook dinner and leave the dishes for days, and it drives me mad. I’ve raised this issue multiple times over the years and it always goes the same way: everyone agrees to make more of an effort, the kitchen is clean for a week, and then the dishes pile up again. I feel as though I’ve tried everything, from initiating a friendly discussion about household labour division to simply sending messages along the lines of: “Please can you wash your dishes today.”
The situation is really bothering me, particularly because I feel I am overpaying for the flat. A more even redistribution of rent is out of the question as neither can afford it.
I don’t think I will be able to make them change their behaviour long-term – they clearly have a different tolerance for mess and are not acting maliciously. But I find myself furious from the moment I wake up and walk into the dirty kitchen, and it’s not only impacting my relationship with them but everyone around me who has to put up with my grumpiness. I don’t like the person it turns me into. How can I let go of this irritation and stop it affecting my life?
Eleanor says: It’s admirable of you to ask about how you can handle your feelings rather than how you can change their behaviour. As you’ve noted, hoping to “make” people do anything sets us up for disappointment.
But living spaces matter. Like that apocryphal story about a frog in gradually heating water that doesn’t realise it is boiling to death, before you know it the little problems in your home can add up to a distress much bigger than the sum of its parts. Everybody needs somewhere restorative, somewhere they can switch off. To have dirty dishes piling up in your “room of one’s own” is no good for the soul.
You’re right that irritation like this can eat a relationship whole, whether it is spouses or friends or roommates. The resentment curdles too much, the theme gets too set into the narrative of the relationship. Everything your housemates do may eventually start to seem like more evidence confirming their disregard for you (“Showering at this hour? Typical”); every creak in the flat more proof you’re trapped in an unenjoyable living situation.
Perhaps, to combat that, you could give yourself some private ways of allowing the irritation – even having fun with it. It’s all very well to soothe this feeling and try to shrink it, but sometimes anger only goes away once we let it boil. You could keep an album on your phone full of pictures of the worst offences, annotate them like crime scene photos, or write up petty “letters to the editor” you never send – do something private with the irritation before you ask it to go away. Perhaps (though this might be more interventionist than you’d like) you could you get a plastic tub with a lid and put the dirty dishes in it. Say it’s to stop pests. Then at least they’re out of sight.
After the feeling has had its little petty moment of recognition, then you can think about ways to shrink it. When a person’s traits drive you nuts, sometimes it can help to focus on the flipside of those same traits. Say someone’s always late, for instance. The part of their personality that makes them act like that might also be responsible for something you like about them: they’re spontaneous, or easygoing. Is there any “flipside” of this habit that’s part of what you like about your housemates? Are they low maintenance to live with, not especially fussed with rules, forgiving of your own foibles?
Perhaps, too, you could find ways to insist on order and cleanliness elsewhere. In your own room, in a “private use only” tea stand – some ritual or space where you can meet your own preferences without anyone else’s interruption.
Lastly, one sure way of releasing your frustration about a situation like this is to know it’s going to end. A lot of unbearable things become bearable once we know they’re finite. If your options here are to hope they’ll someday change or to hope you’ll someday not mind, your best bet may be to start seriously looking for alternatives. Reframing and private venting are ways of coping with a sacrifice you have to make. Not all sacrifices are like this. When something repeatedly ruins your days, it’s OK to walk away.
This letter has been edited for length.
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